Forgive me for returning to the subject of audiences. How much difference does the audience make? Not a great deal, you might be forgiven for thinking at many performances in British theatre – performances that would be just the same whether we were there or not, just as a movie plays regardless of whether the cinema is full or empty. Even a number of apparently more radical performances, appearing to allow the audience to interact, are predicated on the assumption that the audience will shut up and do precisely what they're told.

I felt that very much last Friday night, watching Under the Influence in Plymouth. The show was all the more disappointing because, in previous productions, Ontroerend Goed have subverted theatrical illusion, pulling the rug from under your feet so quickly that you were forced to respond.

On the whole, we are seldom challenged as an audience, and we seldom challenge: we play our passive role to perfection. It is easy to assume that the reason we do it so well in Britain is a combination of reserve and a tendency towards a particular type of theatre that casts us in the role of a spectator. But even that can be subverted if the audience refuses to bide by the unspoken rules, whether by noisy walkout or noisy appreciation. I once saw a production of The Importance of Being Earnest entirely derailed by a man near the front who was laughing so loudly that it was as if the entire convention of theatre was being questioned.

As Mark Shenton observed in a blog last week, the recent press night of Much Ado at the Open Air theatre in Regent's Park featured disruptions that some found irritating, others enlivening. But mostly we laugh and clap politely at the moments when we should, and never do anything that might disrupt the spectacle – perhaps most of all, ironically enough, when we're invited to make fools of ourselves on stage by the Blue Man Group or at the local panto.

But at the riotously enjoyable press night of Oladipo Agboluaje's Iyà-Ilé, I wondered about this willingness to sit quietly. On press night, the audience was pretty evenly split between a white audience, who seemed to keep relatively quiet, and a black audience with Nigerian connections, who received the play with a level of engagement that seemed so complete that it gave them the right to make vocal interventions.

I mentioned it in passing when talking to the Soho theatre's Lisa Goldman this week, and she said that the play is quite different depending on the cultural mix of the audience – sometimes playing as an almost Chekhovian comedy, and at others quite loud and abrasive. As the Globe at its very best has already proved, Shakespeare works very differently when those in the yard are fully engaged and the audience becomes a genuine part of the dynamic.

The Globe experience may suggest that a standing audience has something to do with this, but so do cultural differences and learned behaviours. The way Alan Howard's Oedipus was received when I saw it in Epidaurus – to an audience including large number of picnicking families, who got up and wandered around when the mood took them – was entirely different from the way it was received at the National. The lack of reverence in Epidaurus wasn't disrespectful; it seemed simply an acceptance that theatre is part of life, and that the ancient stories told in that theatre have as much relevance now as they did then.

One of the most invigorating experiences of my life, in fact, was at a schools performance of Nitro's Slamdunk at Birmingham Rep. The mostly young and mostly black audience talked and sent texts the entire way through. At one point, when music was playing, some girls got up and danced. Was this unforgivable rudeness? Not at all: almost every kid in that audience was engaged with what was happening on stage, and being vocal was their way of showing it. It seemed nobody had told them that you're supposed to shut up and show minimal emotion in the theatre. It was infinitely preferable to the half-comatose state that seems to be the default mode of most British theatre audiences. The other week at Soho, too, the audience showed that they were having a jolly good time – and it turned a great night out into an outstanding one.